Professor pays ultimate price in country he loved

by Adam Geller - Mar. 9, 2009 12:00 AMAssociated Press

EDITOR'S NOTE — Michael Bhatia had visited Afghanistan as a scholar before, but that was then, and this — dangerous work alongside U.S. soldiers — was now. Second of two parts on the first social scientist to die in a controversial Pentagon program.

After seven nights sleeping on the ground, and seven days without a hot shower, Master Sgt. Rachael Ridenour was beat.

But when the Blackhawk helicopter touched down at Forward Operating Base Salerno, Ridenour and teammate Tom Garcia headed straight for the plywood hut that served as the Human Terrain team's office. It was time to meet their new colleague.

They expected a jetlagged and lost-looking newbie. But the man who rose to shake their hands talked in overdrive. He used vocabulary that made clear he was no soldier. In two days waiting for them to return from their mission, Michael Bhatia had already begun two research projects.

Heading to the barracks, Ridenour and Garcia assessed the new guy.

"He needs to hurry up and get tired or it's going to be a long year keeping up with him," she said.

The AF-1 team would need that energy. The last rotation had left the team without a social scientist as it sought to establish its role at FOB Salerno, a U.S. Army beachhead within a dozen miles of Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan.

The addition of Bhatia, soon nicknamed "The Nutty Professor," brought the team to five. But it remained a tiny add-on to a large and highly structured military operation.

Bhatia would have to make a place for himself. But from the moment the academic returned to Afghanistan, it was clear he was on new and treacherous ground.

"Hard day for the 82nd, yesterday a company commander and driver were killed by an IED in Paktika," Bhatia e-mailed his mentor, Jarat Chopra, on his first morning back. "I don't think I'm expected to duck, but to protect myself."

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In November 2007, FOB Salerno was home to the 82nd Airborne Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team.

In Khost and surrounding provinces, the 82nd, hailing from Fort Bragg, N.C., was devoting much of its manpower to patrols and reconstruction of schools and roads, trying to build support in areas that might otherwise be lost to insurgents.

The Human Terrain team found its place by asking questions about subjects soldiers normally overlook.

Garcia, an "east Texas country boy," was making himself an expert on theft from military convoys.

Ridenour, a career military policewoman, was tracking the price Afghan locals paid for cooking oil, flour and other staples.

A week before Thanksgiving, Bhatia joined them in his first mission, to neighboring Paktika Province.

Team leader Lt. Col. Pat Cusick had served in Paktika as deputy commander of a reconstruction team. It was not an easy place to read, Cusick knew. In meetings, the villager who spoke was frequently acting as mouthpiece for a silent elder.

But it became clear Bhatia already understood that. Villagers, initially skeptical, opened up to the new arrival who spoke to them of Paktika's history.

"I wish I knew this two years ago," Cusick told himself, as he listened to the conversation between elders and Bhatia.

Bhatia zeroed in on his own research, gauging the insurgency by tracking attacks on local leaders who were combatants' rivals for power.

One afternoon, Garcia and Bhatia sat across from a district commissioner. Which village elders had been assassinated in the area, Bhatia asked the man. Which religious leaders had been threatened?

"No one has ever asked me those questions before," the official replied. "These questions should've been asked a long time ago."

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By January, Bhatia's colleagues had confirmed an amusing and occasionally worrisome contradiction in the Professor's character.

He certainly knew his stuff. At times, though, he could be remarkably oblivious.

On a mission in the village of Zormat, Garcia watched with admiration and alarm as Bhatia's marketplace interviewing drew a crowd of nearly 50.

"Whoever was out with Michael, that was part of our job, to bring him back in. Hey, don't forget we're out here in the middle of the combat zone," said Garcia, who recalls scanning the crowd for lumps that could have signaled a bomb.

Bhatia and Garcia, who had logged 16 years in the Air Force, didn't seem to have much in common. But they forged an unlikely bond. Garcia was part American Indian. Bhatia's father was from India. They became unlikely brothers. Bhatia called his colleague "feather, not dot." Garcia called his partner "dot, not feather."

Bhatia wore fatigues and sometimes carried an M-4 carbine. But teammates teased him when they spotted red argyle socks peeking out of his combat boots. They laughed harder when he failed to see what was funny about that.

Ridenour tried to school him. In the military, she explained, once you're accepted as an expert, just boil down your findings to three or four bullet points. But Bhatia, who had once written a 70,000-word draft chapter for his eight-chapter doctoral thesis, was ever the scholar.

Over time, his quirks and those of other team members generated tension.

Workdays stretched to 14 hours. Bhatia and Garcia slept 4 feet apart and right next to the rear door of a bunkhouse filled with soldiers. Garcia got annoyed when Bhatia snored. Bhatia got annoyed because Garcia woke up at 5 a.m.

Finally, the team's irritation boiled over. At a meeting in the team's makeshift office, Ridenour passed out copies of a Myers-Briggs personality test. They would come to terms with each other by filling out the questionnaire.

"We figured out how to become a family," Garcia said, "and after that, that's what we did become."

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On one wall of their shack at the base, the team stapled articles sent by colleagues stationed back at Fort Leavenworth.

Critics were not letting up in their condemnation of the Human Terrain project. The team kept score, posting what they considered the most outrageously off-base characterizations of their work.

"Mercenary anthropologists," one critic called them. "The Army's new secret weapon," another said.

Ridenour, Bhatia and the others read them aloud with frustration and laughter.

"Our school of thought was come work with us for a week," Ridenour said. "If you really think I'm a mercenary, come see what we do."

Still, Bhatia bridled at the criticism. Before leaving, he'd told his family and friends of his irritation with academics who claimed to know a country, without ever leaving the capital city.

But the team members were almost too busy to dwell on the criticism.

Winter had set in. On a mission over the New Year, they'd worked in temperatures that dropped to 20 below. Now, in February and March, they stayed put. When the 82nd rotated out, the team waited for instructions from the new command of the 101st Airborne.

"It was kind of frustrating because we all wanted to be out," Cusick said.

But there were reasons to look ahead. Come July, Bhatia told friends, he'd be back for two weeks of home leave.

Before that, though, there was work to do.

On April 30, Bhatia and Garcia got long-awaited clearance. The next morning, they'd finally get out from behind the wire.

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Sabari District lies less than 10 miles from FOB Salerno. But by Humvee, the journey took Bhatia and Garcia four hours, rumbling over the rough tracks that pass for roads and into volatile territory.

Less than two months earlier, insurgents had detonated a vehicle packed with explosives in Sabari's district center, killing two U.S. soldiers. This was to be Bhatia and Garcia's first stop.

The other team members remained on base. By Tuesday night, May 6, Bhatia and Garcia had reached Zambar, a distant village built of mud bricks, and met with a group of about 20 tribal elders.

"Michael was very psyched," Cusick said. Bhatia and Garcia were unearthing details of a long dispute between tribes over which had rights to the timber covering a nearby mountainside.

The following morning, the last full day of the mission, they joined a patrol of 17 soldiers in four up-armored Humvees. Garcia had been traveling in the lead Humvee, together with the convoy commander. But the lieutenant called Garcia over. Could Bhatia ride up front today?

The convoy set out for a bazaar called Makhtab, less than 2 miles east.

The vehicles threaded down a hard, chalky riverbed. Makhtab came into sight and the patrol swung out of the riverbed to enter by a rear portal.

The day was hot, the Humvee's engine emitted a numbing drone, and Garcia was feeling drowsy.

A deafening thump jolted him wide awake. Air shot down the Humvee's turret.

Garcia squinted into a cloud of smoke.

Soldiers spilled from their vehicles. Garcia grabbed his M-4 and bolted into the smoke.

As he ran, the settling dust revealed Bhatia's Humvee, spun around 90 degrees by the bomb's force, its doors blown off.

The body of Spc. Jeremy Gullet, a 22-year-old father from Greenup, Ky., lay in the dirt, well clear of the wreckage. Staff Sgt. Kevin Roberts, 25, of Farmington, N.M., lay dead nearby.

"I've got to find my brother," Garcia said.

When he reached Bhatia, the academic's bearded face was frozen in a smile.

Garcia crouched beside his friend and colleague as rain began to fall. He placed his palm over the dead man's still-open eyes and smoothed the lids closed, then brushed the dirt off Bhatia's uniform.

"It should've been me," the veteran soldier told the scholar. "I'm going to take you home."

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At Bhatia's funeral on May 16, Garcia and Ridenour wore red argyle socks in honor of their fallen teammate.

Human Terrain manager Steve Fondacaro presented Bhatia's parents and sister with the Defense of Freedom medal awarded to the scholar.

"Because of Michael Bhatia's superb contributions to his team's mission, significant numbers of American soldiers and Afghan civilians, who would have otherwise been casualties of war, are alive and together with their families today," the citation reads.

That evening, back in Providence, R.I., friends from both sides of the wire gathered at the Wild Colonial, and raised pints of Guinness to bid Bhatia farewell.

In the weeks afterward, Bhatia's circle struggled with his death.

Professor Keith Brown returned to his desk, across the atrium from the office that used to be Bhatia's, and weighed the meaning of his colleague's sacrifice.

It wasn't until late July, while serving as lay leader of his church in Providence that Brown found, if not an answer, then perhaps a route to one.

At the pulpit that Sunday, Brown spoke about the ripples of the war on terrorism, and about Bhatia. Then he asked congregants to join him in reading a poem by Archibald MacLeish, "The Young Dead Soldiers."

"Whether our lives were for peace and a new hope, or for nothing, we cannot say; it is you who must say this," Bhatia's colleague read.

"We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning," the worshippers answered.